I'm sorry to hear that you had a close call--Hopefully you are better and back on the matt shortly. As I mentioned in another post, my sensei had a close call recently too. But he's better, and anyway, my best thoughts and wishes are with you. And you made some really good points in your post (as per usual).

Last night I finally viewed a tape that my aikido club has had for awhile titled "Dynamic Aikido Combat vol I." It was from Nihon Goshin Aikido, taught by McEwan Sensei or something like that. I must say I thought it was pretty cool. The sensei moved very quickly, and they sort of focused on "non traditional attacks," but they really aren't all that different than shomen, yokumen, munatski, etc. The style was very different than what I do, but still cool, and it's given me some good ideas and variations of techniques that I had not seen or heard of. Cool tape if you guys get the chance to check it out. I think it's selling point was something like: "Most realistic gun takeaways ever caught on tape.--kung fu magazine."